Uncle Jimbo.
                 A Dinkum Australian, a Good Mate & the Rellie from Hell

                        
        I first met Uncle Jimbo in London. Although born in Pommieland I'd wanted to come to Australia since I was eleven, so as twenty-one hit me a fourpenny one I became a 'Ten Pound Tourist'.
        Before I left the Old Dart forever I took to hanging around Earls Court (Kangaroo Alley) for it chock full of full-on , full-blown Aussies behaving very badly . . roaring blokes and sheilas ! I loved it. Crikey I thought, the poms enjoyed a drink ,but nothing like this mob !  They drank like fish, they fought like tigers and sang Aussie songs as fat tears ran down their cheeks. Their Friday night talent contests at the Chunderer's Arms (The King's Arms) or down at the  Pig's Arsehole (Pig & Whistle) be it in the drinking stakes , the bush poets challenge or the singing fests were something out of this world, and larger than all the other lives, head and beergut above and beyond anyone else . . loomed Uncle Jimbo ..

        It was my first introduction to this great Australian madman. I can still remember Uncle Jimbo taking out first prize one grog soaked Friday night with the 'Pom's Lament and the Bushman's Answer', doing both parts, swapping hats and accents at will ...
    He taught it to me later that night in Leicester Square polis station, in between arm wrestling the entire station staff in to letting us go.They even gave us a lift back to the pub.
        So, here it is . . as done over by Uncle Jimbo . .
          

      'Pom's Lament and the Bushman's Answer'

boundary rider.....preamble...
   
I am a boundary rider I was out the other day
    Checking out the fences down Mundiwindi way,
    When I heard this dreadful whining sound
            come floating up the creek,
    It started as a sobbing moan and ended as a shriek,
    It sent a shiver down my spine, was murder being done ?
I raced to the rescue, and found, blubbering under a gum
    A whining whey-faced whacker . . A pasty 'to-and-from' . .
    A complete and utter bastard . .whinging bloody pom !      Listen to this . .   
   
pom . . . Hurrah for good old England,We'll soon be going there,
                   This hungry life and awful strife,We can no longer bear.
                            We were pitched into the backblocks,
                                We might as well have been dead,
            A chaff bag was our pillow, the ground our feather bed.
             We lived on tea and damper, and sometimes kangaroo,
              Daytime we were scorched to death, night time frozen blue.
                But now at last I see some hope, of getting from this hole,
     Hurrah for good old England, where they're dishing out the dole.

Bushman's Answer . .

You're a whinging mob of bastards, No bloody guts you've got,
I hope the bloody boat goes down,And drowns the bloody lot.
Since you've been out here in Aussie,
                  You've done nothing else but moan,
                    You're a whinging lot of bludgers,
                         And you should have stayed at home.
You thought you'd pick up sovereigns in our bloody flaming streets
You though you'd pick up nuggets in our floody blaming creeks.
You thought you'd make your fortune,After being here one day,
   You're a bludging mob of bastards, And it's time you went away!

    pom . . You don't understand me . .        
             I miss the green and rolling hills, I miss the summer rain,
             I miss me Mum and me Uncle Jim, I'll catch the morning train.

Bushman . .
I love me sunburnt country,I love me sweeping plains
I'll drink to your departure, you must be off your flaming brain !
            You complete and utter flaming drongo !!


 From birth to his bizarre death when he was killed by a falling shark, Uncle Jimbo's life story is a remarkable saga. From Kerosene Lane to Carnac Island he made his mark on this ancient land. You loved him or you loathed and feared him. There was no middle ground.

Uncle Jimbo's History of White Australia came about thusly . . He was a fount of information on Oz. Some spot on, some a bit hmmmm. I collected his material from many locations and watering holes. His Island Bar Lectures,  his Trucking Tapes and Campfire Carpings. His knowledge was huge but a bit sketchy, his family gets a bit of guernsey and I had to edit some of his personal descriptives for the sake of the children . . A messy business but someone had to do it. Me.

 Uncle Jimbo’s History of Oz pt Three . . . 1935-1999.  Drowning in Lunatic Soup.

Drowning in Lunatic Soup (an excerpt)
NarrSo, for the next three years an abandoned Uncle Jimbo is looked after by various 'Aunties' of the Jimbo and Murphy clans...in various towns throughout the West.Then on the first day he went to school, his father came home in an ambulance! Uncle Jimbo's dad had fallen out of a Landrover whilst attempting to negotiate a hairpin bend at high speed outback the town of Jindabyne...     
UJHe was driving at the time...in fact the only occupant...shickered beyond belief & he now sported two shattered vertabrae and a permanently slipped out disc or two .
UJDadAfter being told by the company doctor that I would never be free of pain I heaved a sigh of relief. Now I could return to the West & nobody could cast reproaches my way whilst I drank myself to oblivion each and every day....hooray !!
narr...we'll now briefly gloss o'er the Incredible Uncle Jimbo's  Incredible Schooldays ('cos that's another story , is the Incredible Uncle Jimbo's Incredible Schooldays)  All we can tell you is that Uncle Jimbo ranted and roared his     way through many a  school...bending over backwards to be a right royal  pain in the bum and at least once a week bending over forwards to receiving a different sort of pain in the bum ..via a viciously whippy length of bamboo !!
UJUpon  reaching High School I almost met my match with Mr Floggem-til-they-scream ,who would belabour me until near orgasm would weaken his thrashing arm, then he would send the trembling boy to fetch another thrashee , thus whiling away a very pleasant afternoon, doing serious things to young boys bottoms, doing for free what many an English parliamentarian paid serious money for....so it was for four years each wire strung Friday afternoon ...
                                         
       Friday Afternoon 1964


    
Each wire-strung Friday afternoon sees a recently violently caned boy

                 dance a pain-filled path to the next victim’s classroom ..

      A knock then the white-faced potential criminal snarls                                 

 through snot-filled nostrils “Excuse me sir . . . Jimbo’s next”

         And the next victim, leaden bellied,

            Courses t’ords the lair of the always vexed

                  and sadistic fat-flanneled bastard of a headmaster.



As the boy sidles into the study the Head of School

         is selecting from an incredibly large bundle the appropriate cane to fit the crime . .

His headmasterly fixed and rictus grin stiffens into a benedictive mask

         as he viciously slices the air with his anti-bad-behaviour wand,

And with scarce concealed derision,His beady bastarding eyes

        flick the white-faced boy to the punishing position.

After the event the malevolent mongrel would deliver,

                                            deliberately baiting,  

A creepy little carefully chosen homily,

         all the while swinishly a-waiting

            for a defiant tear to blear through



        Sometimes we won . . .  sometimes not . . .

         He enjoyed our pain and tears . . .  I swear.




    ©..roger montgomery


Uncle Jimbo



Drowning in Lunatic Soup

The Life & Times of Uncle Jimbo

part three of     Uncle Jimbo's History of (White) Australia

by Roger Montgomery

As performed by the Dingo's Breakfast Oz Music & Poetry Band

Kerosene
Lane		another excerpt from 'Drowning . . in fact, from the bginning . .


In Kerosene Lane, back of the city
Back of the factories, prospects not pretty.
T'wixt walls black with grime, just off Folly Road
'Twas there we grew up in working-class mode . .
Driven to sleep by the slam of the loom,
The crack of the shuttles that shook our bedroom . .
That housed seven kids from five to eleven
Mum died with the eighth, hope Mum's now in heaven,
And though Dad's just twenty-nine
He's withering on the vine
In Kerosene Lane, back of the city . . .
Meredith

The Jimbo and Murphy clan's double christening ceremony was a pretty lavish do for those mean, lean wearying years of the mid nineteen thirties. The Great Depression was in full swing, but, thanks to the canniness of the Kerosene Lane crowd, the carefully hoarded potato beer flowed freely. . .





    The bare bones of pt three of Uncle Jimbo’s History of Australia

'Drowning In Lunatic Soup'  is a darkly comedic modern fable on the perils of potwalloping and its consequences familial . From a gin-soaked birth to his recent demise (killed by a falling shark) we follow the crazed antipodean antics of Uncle Jimbo , a totally committed Oz boozician of the old school.  Laugh and weep as Uncle Jimbo reels around the Great Australiian suburban sly grog shops , roars through the six o'clock swill to finally tumble into an esky-filled Pommie-land and then thundering back to circumnavigate Oz ten dozen times or so, all the while carooming into and off innocent and not so innocent bystanders.
    Weep and laugh as his past wrings the bottleneck of his future.

 Drowning in Lunatic Soup  cranks up during the Great Depression, rocks and rolls into and out of several wars to finally land up, stranded in the incognitant Nineties , and we cannot all help but be dragged along in the foaming wake of the Jimbo and Murphy clans as they view the world with the jaundiced eye of the well-read working class, or from the bottom of a glass, with more than the odd member of the clan drowning in butts of Malmsley , or catching deadly doses of the dingbats, family members all , assidously working long dark hours to survive and perhaps, prosper.


 . . and . .



Also . . Part One of U.J's History of (White)Oz . . 17??-1890
                The Right and Proper Currency.
The 'Right & Proper Currency' starts with the White Man's invasion of Australia and all its attendant beastliness wrought cheefully its beastly attendants, the rise and fall of the Currency Children, and battling through to the 'Free' Selection shambles . .
 
         THE BALLAD OF A MAJOR SQUATTER IN A MINOR      UJ's/HIST OZ...page 26



I WAS A SQUATTER WITH TEN THOUSAND ACRES
‘TIL THE FREE SELECTORS CAME CALLING
I WAS A BIG MAN WITH THE MOVERS AND SHAKERS.
'TIL FREE SELECTION SENT US A-SPRAWLING...
SAID THEY... ‘YOUR LAND IS NOW MINE...YOU’VE HAD A FINE TIME
    AND TREATED YOUR WORKERS LIKE DOGS
BUT NOW IT’S OUR TURN TO SLASH AND TO BURN...
OUR TURN TO LIVE HIGH ON THE HOG...    NOT SO...

CHORUS...
(NOT WITH) OUR FLYING HUTS AND FOLDABLE FENCING
     BULLOCK DRAWN HOUSES ON WHEELS
    COLONIAL SURVEYMEN...DEEP IN MY POCKET...
    TO HELP OIL THE WHEELS AND THE DEALS !
    FORCING THEM OUT WITH THE LAW’S FORCE AND CLOUT
    LAUGHING AT THE FREE - SELECTOR’S SQUEALS AND APPEALS . . .

roger montgomery2011©


N.B. Part two of UJ's History of (white) Oz . . 1891-1934-ish
'Battles, Battlers and Right Bastards' is currently in the mix. The discovery of Gold, unfortunately brought the Poms well and truly back into play. From the dumping ground for convicts and the second and thirds sons of the useless aristocracy, it changed into a valuable adjunct to the great British Empah and the representatives of this rapacious establishment saddled up, came over and took over. Then came Eureka, 1891, more Depressions, WW1, The Grrreat Depression, the New Guard, Jack Lang and WW2.
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